The Sleep of Reason
by Alixtii
Summary: Willow and Tara drop Dawn off at the Hyperion Hotel to stay with Wesley and Fred while an apocalypse brews in Sunnydale. But L.A. isn't exactly safe, either. Set during the summer between BtVS seasons 5 and 6. Spoilers for The Gift.


**The Sleep of Reason**

Dawn stands in the corner of the lobby of the Hyperion Hotel while everyone else discusses her.

"Thanks for watching Dawn for us," Willow is saying to Wesley. "The portents are pointing to it being a little hairy in Sunnydale this weekend."

Oh, yes, Dawn thinks. Poor little Dawnie can't be in Sunnydale. It's too dangerous. She might get hurt. She snorts in frustration, but no one even notices. They're so wrapped up in protecting her they've forgotten she exists.

"Where's Cordelia?" Dawn asks, trying to break into their obliviousness. Wesley blinks, noticing her. "She decided to follow example Angel's example, get away from L.A. on a spiritual retreat."

"That's nice," says Tara. "I didn't realize that Buffy's death touched her so deeply."

"I rather doubt it did," Wesley says wryly. "She went to Vegas."

They go back to talking, quickly forgetting Dawn once again.

* * *

The Hyperion Hotel is freaky at night. Dawn supposes she shouldn't be surprised; after all, it's owned by a vampire and according to Wesley was haunted by a Thesulac demon for several centuries. (_Thesula_, _Thesulac_, Dawn's mind wonders. Could there be some type of shared etymology for the names of the demon and the orb?) 

Much of the hotel is still run-down, with only a few rooms renovated to allow habitation. Angel's suite, of course, as well as the room Dawn is currently living in. The room which Wesley and Gunn take turns living in to watch Fred, and now Dawn. This week it's Wesley's turn.

Dawn slips out of her room and makes her way down the hallway towards the bathroom. As she passes Fred's room, she notices the girl's light is still on. She hasn't seen much of Fred so far this weekend, as she seems to be more than a little shy and keeps to herself for the most part. Wesley says this is because she has just recently returned from a 500-year stint in a hell dimension called Pylea.

As she passes Fred's room, though, she notices the door is open and the light is on. She can hear faint muttering, and so when she passes by she makes a point to glance in out of the corner of her eye. Fred is standing on her bed, it looks like, writing on the wall. Dawn can't quite make out what; as silently as she can, she inches towards Fred's door, peering in.

"—in any system sufficiently powerful to refer to itself," Fred is saying, as she jots down an elaborate sequence of letters, numbers, and symbols with a magic marker, "theta-prime will be greater than the sigma of an infinite series. . . ."

Dawn doesn't know what any of it means, but she stands, transfixed by the sight of this strange woman writing all over her bedroom wall. Stands there so long, that eventually Fred turns around and sees her.

"Oh!" Fred says. "I didn't know you were there. I didn't—" She breaks off, staring at Dawn as if she's grown a third head or something. Which, of course, is always a possibility.

"I tried to solve it for a single value of _x_," Fred says, stepping closer. "I couldn't get the equation to balance, not until we found the answer in the book and came home. But you, you solve it for all the variables of _x_, in _n_-dimensional space."

She's crazy, is Dawn's first thought, and then she realizes it is true. Fred is crazy, which means that she can see the Key. Dawn shivers a little.

"I observe," says Fred, "but the _eigen_states don't collapse. You're a girl, and you're the Key. The cat is dead and alive."

"Cat?" asked Dawn? "What cat?" Is there a zombie cat running around someplace?

"Schrödinger's, silly," Fred says, and Dawn wonders for a moment what the hell this Schrödinger fellow's zombie cat has to do with anything. Then her thoughts rapidly shift directions as Fred kisses her.

Dawn's never been kissed before, but she has a decent sense of how it works. She's watched Willow and Tara kiss, after all, but those kisses are usually relatively chaste, quick demonstrations of affection. They save the deep, long kisses for the privacy of their bedroom (Dawn tries not to think of it as her mother's bedroom anymore), safely sealed off from Dawn's innocent eyes.

Still, Dawn knows enough to let her lips slip open to make way for Fred's tongue, which explores Dawn's mouth with a curious fastidiousness. The kiss lingers, until finally Fred pulls away, looking at Dawn as she does so.

"Why did you do that?" Dawn asks. Not that she's complaining, exactly, but she knows that it's not normal for women in their late twenties to just randomly kiss fourteen-year-old girls.

"An experiment," Fred answers. "The scientific method. Testing a hypothesis. You're a girl." She reaches out and touches the thin white fabric of Dawn's nightshirt, rubbing it through her fingers. "You're real."

Dawn knows that the validation shouldn't mean so much to her, that she shouldn't be exhaling a comforted sigh of relief. But she does, anyway.

* * *

Dawn returns to Fred's room the next night, but when she arrives the scene is very different. Fred is missing, and her bed and drawers and her sparse possessions are knocked over onto the floor. The window is broken. Dawn has lived in (has remembered living in) Sunnydale long enough to recognize this as the scene of a struggle. Without stopping to think, she races to the room Wesley has been staying in. 

He responds to Dawn's fevered pounding by coming to the door in his boxer shorts. Quickly, she explains to him what she's seen, and before she even finishes he's off, racing across the hall to Fred's room. There he pauses, examining the scene extremely closely.

"Here," he says, pointing to some scratches on the wall. "Sugruchni claw marks. Explains why neither of us heard any of the conflict."

Dawn doesn't know how that explains anything, but she's the only other person in the room, so Wesley must be talking to her. It's the way that Giles and Willow and Tara and Xander and Spike all talk to each other, not telling, not explaining, but informing, as if the recipient's input was valued. The way that she wishes they would talk to her, but they never do.

Wesley does. "They'll take her to a scene of trauma, where the boundaries of her reality began to break down. The library." He pauses. "We should both get dressed. If we hurry, we can get to her before they manage to harm her."

* * *

Fifteen minutes later she and Wesley are in the Hyperion lobby, choosing weapons. Yes, weapons. How cool is that? Willow and Tara would probably have a heart attack if they knew. 

As they do so, Wesley explains about the Sugruchni. "They're parasites," he tells her. "They feed on human madness. They drive a person deeper and deeper into insanity, drawing sustenance from their delirium, until the person can no longer tell between illusion and reality. Then, the Sugruchni began to alter reality to make the person's delusions real."

"Is that how they kept us from hearing?" Dawn asks, running her finger along the face of a battleaxe.

Wesley nods. "In Fred's mind, all of reality is describable by mathematics. And numbers are silent."

Dawn ponders that for a moment. "Shouldn't we go get that other guy? Gunn?"

Wesley shakes his head. "There's no time. We need to get to Fred before the Sugruchni manage to drive her any further into insanity. And I wouldn't want to bother him."

Dawn knows that that last part is one of the worst excuses she's ever heard. Wesley doesn't want to admit to Gunn that he lost Fred on his watch. He wants to be the one to rescue her by himself, barging in like a knight in shining armor. Dawn's just a little girl, so she doesn't matter. The thought depresses her for a moment, but then Wesley throws a knife to her.

She has to force herself not to cover her face with her hands or to run screaming. Wesley doesn't throw it hard or fast, but in a graceful arc, though, so she's able to take control of herself and grab it by the hilt. When she does so, a thrill of accomplishment passes through her. As well as a thrill of the forbidden: she knows damn well that Willow and Tara aren't going to be throwing her any knives. She's lucky if she gets handed a knife firmly with the blade pointed away. And even then, it's probably only a meat knife for dinner, not a large Bowie knife for hacking demons to bits.

"Let's go," Wesley says, making his way out of the Hyperion Hotel. Dawn follows behind him, holding her knife and doing her best to contain her excitement. As she exits, she wonders: if Fred's insanity becomes reality, will she end up turned into a zombie cat?

* * *

Hacking evil demons to bits is every bit as fun as Dawn imagined. It turns out that Sugruchni demons look an awful lot like the winged monkeys from _The Wizard of Oz_, only they're no bigger than the size of your palm. They swoop down on her, scratching and biting, but Dawn just keeps swiping at them with her knife, decapitating and dismembering them. 

Soon, their combined efforts succeed in wiping out the Sugruchni nest. Headless and disembowled demons cover the floor of the library. Wesley makes his way to where Fred is tied and gagged under a sign which reads _BF1404-1999: Occult Sciences_.

She smiles when he takes off the gag. "Smart man and pretty Key girl save me from the monsters."

* * *

When Willow and Tara return, it is with tales of an exciting apocalypse. Dawn is sorry she had to miss it. But not too much, because she has had her adventure here in L.A., and she knows that Willow and Tara would never have let her anywhere near danger even if they had let her stay in the city. 

"Anything interesing happen here in L.A.?" Willow asks Wesley.

"No," he says, with a surreptitious wink at Dawn. "It was a quiet weekend."

Dawn smiles and prepares to return to being treated like a child.

**Fin**


End file.
